Any day now, Amazon is set to announce the rescheduled dates for Prime Day 2020. The new dates, which are a result of the usual July event being postponed, are likely to be 13th – 14th October.
If you sell on Amazon, whether you subscribe to Prime Day or not, performance is set to shift dramatically over the course of the event and beyond.
Over its course, Prime Day, Amazon’s biggest global shopping event, has a huge impact on Amazon performance. Across 18 countries that participated last year, over $2bn in sales were seen by small and medium businesses selling on Amazon. Whether you advertise or not, it’s an important event to prepare for. Advertisers last year saw an average sales lift of 4.6x on the products they weren’t advertising, compared to the day before Prime Day (Amazon).
It’s not just sales that soar on Prime Day, either. Last year, Amazon saw an average 7x increase in new to brand shoppers on Prime Day than the day before (Amazon), suggesting shoppers are open to trying new products and brands and are encouraged to do so on Prime Day.
Get ahead of the curve
As we’ve seen, Prime Day is an imperative period of the year for anyone who sells on Amazon. To take advantage of this, we recommend starting early to make the absolute most of this new Q4 mini-peak. Having solid operational foundations are key as running out of stock at 10am on Prime Day would be far from ideal! If you haven’t already, take this into consideration and ensure your stock is fully prepped.
In preparation for Prime Day, take the next two weeks to test, test, test every aspect of your Amazon activity. Testing promoted product strategies, copy across Product Detail Pages as well as keyword and bidding strategies can all help to start Prime Day in the best place possible – by ensuring every aspect of “BAU” activity is in top shape for both shopper engagement and, of course, maximum visibility to those shoppers.
As the lid has been tightly sealed on the details on Prime Day this year, it remains to be seen how many merchants will take part in the official deals. Though you can no longer submit for Amazon’s official Prime Day promos, you can still set up your own promotions throughout the event to further increase conversion rates across the event.
If you are participating in discounting or “bundling”, or any other Prime Day deals, don’t forget to update your Amazon Store to reflect these. On average, Amazon sees that linking ads to a Brand Store rather than a product page results in a 23% better Return on Advertising Spend – (Amazon) so if you don’t already do so, consider switching over ahead of time.
In past years, there’s also been an uplift in traffic across online retail outside of Amazon, so even if you miss the boat on Amazon, you can do related promotions on your brand site. Similarly, whether you promote on or off Amazon, using social media ads to mirror these promotions can also help boost traffic and sales on the day.
In the midst of Prime Day
Whilst some advertisers have the time and wherewithal to refresh the sales dashboard every five minutes, others may not. Make sure you don’t miss out on valuable Prime Day traffic by bumping up your campaign budgets, even up to 200% more than your usual budgets, if performance can handle such a change. This will ensure your campaigns don’t switch off once they use up their original budgets. This can happen much earlier in the day than usual due to the huge uplift in demand, so don’t miss out by restricting your spend.
The same goes for bidding. On previous Prime Days, competition has been hot and a significant jump in bids is needed in some categories to combat this. Thankfully, though, due to increased conversion rates and engagement from Shoppers, this should be enough to counteract any negative impact on efficiency or Advertising Cost of Sale (ACOS).
There are many changes in such short periods of time during Prime Day. As such, dedicating your time to close monitoring is essential for success. Tracking things like whether you have the buy box on particular items, reviewing competitor activity and being ready to shift focus depending on sales or unforeseen issues is key.
Post-Prime Day success
As we’ve touched on, Prime Day can drive so much more than just “sales”. Make sure to measure the impact past your ACOS by carefully considering “softer” metrics such as:
New to Brand metrics – With LTV on everyone’s lips, New to Brand (available for Sponsored Brand campaigns only) tells you what percentage of your sales came from new customers – those who are either brand agnostic, or have chosen to jump ship for your brand this Prime Day.
Brand search impressions – Understand how your branded search volume changes over time both before and after Prime Day – one of the best indicators that those “new to brand” customers have been switched over on a more permanent basis.
Finally, last year in the US Amazon saw that paid search impressions were 141% higher in the two weeks post-Prime Day, compared to the two weeks before, suggesting that the shockwaves of Prime Day will continue to be felt throughout the course of Q4. Getting it right, then, is crucial to a quarter of success. Don’t forget to look out for our upcoming post on how to boost DSP activity for Prime Day, too.
If you’d like Croud’s help to make the most of your Amazon activity, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
